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Are you sure about that? How much more energy is it going to take to make these? If it's more, then where is that energy coming from? Are the raw materials heavier to transport than the current ones? What waste by-products are produced in doing this? What can be done with those by-products?

I would like to see authoritative comment on the overall origin-to-disposal/degradation atmospheric carbon budget of biomass-based vs petroleum-based PET. The energy budget is related, but mainly as it affects atmospheric CO2.

Superficially, the burial of biomass-based non-biodegradable plastic looks rather like atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration. An environmental plus. Biodegradability is a two-edged sword. It removes junk from the environment at the expense of releasing carbon to the atmosphere.

Parent is right, you need ALL of the figures before making a judgment. Maybe I missed a trick.

ElectricSteve writes "Astronomers in Hawaii have announced they've successfully managed to boot up the Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) telescope. Working from dusk to dawn every night, Pan-STARRS is able to map one-sixth of the sky each month, allowing astronomers to track all moving objects, calculate their orbits, and identify any potential threats to Earth. There are four Pan-STARRS cameras in total, each capable of capturing around 1.4 billion pixels over a sensor measuring 40 centimeters square. The focal plane of each camera contains an almost complete 64x64 array of CCD devices, each containing approximately 600x600 pixels, for a total resolution of 1.4 gigapixels."

The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."

christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who once referred to the GNU-Linux operating system as a 'cancer' and who might be hoping that Microsoft's recent lawsuit against TomTom might help wipe the GNU-Linux 'cancer' off the face of the Earth, will be chagrined to learn that GNU-Linux has instead been immortalized in the heavens. It turns out that Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, GNU, and the Linux kernel have all been acknowledged for their contributions to science by having asteroids named after them. The eponymous asteroids are, respectively, 9882_Stallman, 9793_Torvalds, 9965_GNU, and 9885_Linux."Link to Original Source